uhhhh........I think you covered it very well.

Quote Originally Posted by brdad View Post
You should get several different responses to this question, we all approach it differently.

I've come to my own conclusion that if you have an objective to go somewhere, then plot a route and do the caches you want along the way. Doing this has the disadvantage of missing a nice cache that might be just outside the limits of the route, and having to decide in a short amount of time if you feel a particular cache is worth stopping for at that time.

But if your objective is to cache, then you should search for some caches that are the quality and style you'd like to search for, and adjust your route to those. The cache density of many areas makes it hard to decide while which ones strike your mood for the day while on the road, it helps to do a bit of homework ahead of time.

GSAK makes it easy to browse through all Maine caches in a particular area, or you can use import PQs into Google Earth and look for potential caches in the areas you'd like to visit. (There used to be an add on for Google Earth so you could view all caches without loading a PQ, but that feature has just been removed from the site). You can also use the Geocaching.com maps.

When I do go caching in state, I have all my unfound Maine caches loaded in the PDAs as well as the laptop if we take it. Now that I have a Nuvi, I load all unfound Maine caches on that as well. I load as many caches as I can onto the GPSrs, centered around the area I think I am going. This method allows us to change our minds and go in a different direction and still have access to all the caches.